Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

I find that that’s a very difficult question to answer these days.

Originally, it was very much an expat blog, covering the process of settling into a life in France and therefore it slotted fairly neatly into the “travel” category. By listing it as a travel blog, I picked up a whole lot of other stuff travel related and at times over the last year it has most definitely been a travel blog.

However, a glance at the category cloud shows that this is changing. The rise of the America category is a little misleading as that really reflects the increased number of paid posts that I do these days but the rise of Banking & Finance is perhaps more meaningful as it represents the combined effect of me writing more paid posts in this category but also of me writing a lot more normal ones in it as well.

What’ll it look like in six months? I’m sure that America will be much larger for one thing and France will have shrunk as we’re effectively in the process of withdrawing from France (which’ll be quite a long process I suspect). Although you can’t see it yet, the UK categories are also starting to slowly rise so expect to see them starting to displace a few of the France categories over the coming year.

Where I can, I usually try to tag paid posts in the same way as I would for normal ones with the exception that almost all of them are also dropped into the Sponsored category too.

However, over the last six months of doing them quite a lot have been related to America which, if you look at the category cloud to your left, has had the effect that America has risen almost to the same status as France had previously. It’s not so much that the France entries are reducing (although they have been) but that the sheer weight of American ones have shifted the scales considerably.

It could be worse in fact as many posting opportunities specify that the blog has to be written and maintained in America which obviously eliminates us for the moment although it does have me wondering if we were doing pretty much the same level of posting and living in America, would it bring in enough money to live on? I suspect that it could well do and presumably there are at least some Americans with blogging as their occupation. That might sound a little weird but if you think about it, this is just another branch of journalism in some ways and there’s loads of professional journalists around.

Although we’re now well into the marketing season for B&B and self-catering listings sites, the usual wave of marketing e-mails from such places is quite noticeable in its absence this year.

Last year was a little unusual to be fair as maisoneurope.com had a new owner and he was firing out e-mails like there was no tomorrow several times a month at least and sometimes several times per week. This year, that particular factor is absent for the moment though presumably he’ll be getting going again in the not too distant future provided he’s not gone bust on the adwords campaigns that he was running. Whether he was successful at it or not remains to be seen but the site has never yet come up on ordinary searches that I’ve done myself so I’m a bit doubtful. Still, perhaps the adwords to sell the properties combined with the subscription income from them is enough to keep things ticking along nicely.

This year, all that’s appeared sporadically has been an e-mail from frenchentree.com who are expanding their site with rental listings. The pricing doesn’t really work for B&B so I’ve not bothered with them as yet but if their six months free offer is still around in February I’ll probably take them up on it.

Our own sites don’t have offers as such in that they’re free all the time which has caused us problems in roping in new entries for the crazy reason that people figure that if it’s free it doesn’t have any worth. Consequently, we added the option of paying us £29 per year which by placing a value on the listings meant that we started to pull in more people than before.

Of course, that begs the question: if I raised the notional price to, say, £129 would that bring even more people in?

Indeed, if I listed it as a six months free offer would I pull in really big numbers of new entries?

I’m toying with the idea of doing something along these lines on one of our new-generation sites – either Inns4u or perhaps, when I get around to updating it, Our French Chateau (which gets a surprising number of hits even now).

Marketing a B&B is usually a Winter-time activity as you’re just too busy to do much about it during the Summer season when you’re full with guests.

So, as we edge out of the shoulder-season (which can be quite busy), we’re edging into the marketing season and therefore the arrival of e-mails offering to advertise your B&B and bring you thousands of bookings if only you’ll pay a few hundred pounds to list your place.

Last year, I thought I’d have a go at e-mail marketing for the listings sites that I run and was very surprised at the initial reactions that I got. Although the sites are free to list, or rather because they are free to list, several people were very suspicious about them in their replies to my e-mails. So, I had a think about this and added a charging option which interestingly helped me pull in a lot more entries than when it was totally free!

Funnily enough, only one person has ever paid for a subscription to the site yet it seems necessary to have a charge sitting there so that people give their free listing a value ie they are saving £29 per year. The value is even better this year though as I now offer to pay those listed for any recommendations that come via them.

Anyway, I’ve fired off my first batch of e-mails to B&Bs in Scotland last night and it’s already pulled in a dozen or so new entries which is pretty good going for the first day and, all being well, they’ll be trickling in over the rest of the week.

One thing that I found quite surprising when I started doing the paid posts on a more widespread basis than I had before was that a considerable number of them are picked up by various blog aggregation services. So much so that I’ve almost trebled the number of “readers” subscribing to the feed of this blog and there are early signs that An Age of Magic will be going the same way in due course.

Does this matter to me? Well, in theory these guys are ripping off my hard work but on the other hand I’m sure that the advertisers quite like their stuff getting a wider readership than it would do if it were only listed on this blog and, since it gives me more inbound links for no effort, it will gradually increase the amount of money that I get paid to write the articles in the first place. So, for example, my piece “Considering starting an online business” of earlier today has been picked up by YourPropertyNews already.

Funnily enough, the vast majority of the articles picked up by these aggregation sites are those in the Sponsored category so my “real content” seems immune to piracy at the moment. Why this should be, I don’t know, as a lot of the Sponsored content is broadly similar in nature to the “real content”.